Welcome to Lions & Tigers Blog

This area is where we share our class work and experiences with the wider community. We aim to publish a post on a regular basis showcasing our work and we welcome feedback. Please be aware that as our blog is accessed by people of all ages, comments left will need to be approved before being published so you may experience a slight delay before you see your comments on the blog.

This week we have been using our 'Talk for Writing' storytelling skills to tell the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The children have created actions and their own story map to help tell the story.

On the 23rd May Lions and Tigers enjoyed a sunny afternoon in the forest, looking at changes in properties of materials. They began by making their own bread, which was very sticky, but when twisted around a stick and cooked the children thought it was very yummy. To complement this the children had to change cream into butter through vigorous shaking. Following this they had to make their own fire by using a fire stick, this proved very tricky, but through resilience and perseverance they managed it. It was a lovely busy afternoon of learning.

This week the Lions and Tigers used natural resources to explore musical elements in the forest. The child used differing lengths, thickness and types of sticks to learn about rhythm, pitch and tempo. We used clapping rhythms and call and response to make our own music.

Over the Easter holidays the Lions and Tigers were set the task of making a chatterbox as part of their non-compulsory home learning. Chatterboxes are small boxes with objects that can be used as a starting point for a conversation. Chatterboxes could include their favourite things, what they did in the holidays, their family or anything that is important to them. The children had great fun this morning sharing their chatterboxes with their friends and asking questions about each other's boxes. Clearly, a lot of effort had been put in to making these very creative boxes - thank you to all the adults who supported their children with this. These chatterboxes will form a display for the rest of this Half Term and will be returned to the children at the end of the Half Term. To those children who did not make a chatterbox, they were able to confidently talk about their Easter holidays and their favourite things - well done because it can be daunting speaking in front of a group. It was lovely to be able to learn a lot more about our Lions and Tigers such as we have a junior AFC Bournemouth football player and one Tiger is learning to play cricket in the summer. Please keep sharing these achievements with us because we love to learn more about our Lions and Tigers and what makes them special and unique.

This last week of term has been a very busy time in Lions and Tigers. Our wonderful team of adults have been helping us to create lots of lovely Easter crafts. We have also been thinking about the real meaning of Easter and have enjoyed retelling the story of Palm Sunday and the Last Sunday, finishing the story with a superb Easter service at St Mary’s on Thursday with our vicar Ben.

It has been an amazing half term, we are extremely proud of the progress the children have made and would like to thank you for all your continued support.

This week the Lions and Tigers enjoyed an animal inspired visit to the forest. With thanks to the superb adults that accompanied us, the children were able to make bird feeders, a bug hotel, explore our site looking for minibeasts and complete observational drawings using their own charcoal. Following their hard work the children met a mole, rat and a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker. It was an exciting end to this terms Forest Schools.

Lions and Tigers have enjoyed a very creative experience at Forest Schools over the last session. They have been thinking about creating their own Green man sculpture, using clay and natural forest finds. The children enjoyed combining clay with leaves, fir cones and other forest treasure to bring their trees to life and create a personality for their sculpture that is as unique as the tree they created it on. We think they did an excellent job and love their art work.

As the cold weather sets in the children become increasingly more interested in the effects of the weather. Today the children found that the water tray had frozen solid and were very keen to free the balls and numbers stuck in the ice. They began by chipping away at it, but found that this was hard work and very slow. So we had a discussion about how else we could melt the ice. The children spoke about things that could cause the ice to melt, they commented that it melts in the heat of the sun and also remembered that Mr Saunders put salt on the playground to keep them from slipping. So they decided that they would test to see how they could melt the ice the quickest. They set up an experiment with hot water, salt and breaking it up into smaller bits. They found all three methods to be effective, however the hot water was the quickest.

This week in Lions and Tigers, having been on a dinosaur hunt, we have been looking after a dinosaur egg. We have been waiting excitedly to see what would happen. Today we were shocked to find that the egg was missing and that there was a big mess in the classroom including an empty 'Work to Bee Proud Of' wall. We talked about how this made us feel. Luckily, Mr Saunders had e-mailed some CCTV footage to Miss Thompson and Mr Richards. We watched a video of a big T-Rex coming into the classroom. It was still a bit of mystery about what had happened. We had to use our imagination to think carefully about what could have happened. We thought that perhaps a Mummy T-Rex had come to find her missing egg. We used our wonderful sounds to do a Big Write. Here are some examples of our super sentences. It looks like we will have a full 'Work to Bee Proud Of' wall now!

The children love their adventures at our forest schools site, particularly this term where we are exploring natural art. Their most recent session has seen the children working collaboratively to create a group art piece. Inspired by the work of Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long, Lions and Tigers created their own continuous line of natural forest treasures.

This week in Lions and Tigers we have become super storytellers. Together we drew a class storymap to help us remember the sequence of events in the story and the children then used it to help retell the story. Following this many of the children enjoyed drawing their own story maps and sitting in the Storytellers chair to tell it to the other children. Click on the image below to see how well they did.

Lions and Tigers this morning finished the christmas performance with an outstanding production of Cock-a-doodle Christmas. As grown-ups there is nothing that provides a more festive feeling then the Foundation Nativity, it is the perfect way to begin the Christmas celebrations. We would like to express our pride in the efforts and enthusiasm of the children, well done.

For the final Forest School session of the term, the Lions and Tigers made festive forest lanterns. They went on an Autumn scavenger hunt to find and identify different natural objects from the forest such as pine cones and pine needles. Mrs Holley, our Forest School expert, helped us to identify points of interests. We then used what we found to decorate our jam jars. We talked about how now it is darker in the evenings that it may be useful to have a festive lantern. We took our decorated jam jars home to share with our adults and some of us have already put tea-light candles in our jam jars to make our lanterns come to life!

Session two of the children's forest school sessions has continued the adventures of Solomon and Princess Marigold. This time the children helped the princess and the dragon rebuild homes for the forest fairies to live in. As thanks, the fairies then taught the children how to make magic wands. The children are becoming very confident in their new learning environment and are appreciating the woodland rules. I wonder what will happen on their next venture into the woods.

Both the Lions and Tigers have now enjoyed their first full session up at our local forest school site in Harrow Wood. Part of the fun was getting our waterproofs and wellies on and then making the short walk across the field to the forest. Throughout our visit we heard the story of Princess Marigold and her sneezy dragon friend Solomon, they helped us to learn some of our woodland rules. We found out how to move about the site safely and be aware of the camp boundaries through a listening game. Then the king's knights taught us how to choose and carry a stick carefully. Finally we all became royalty when we made our own woodland crowns from natural objects we found on the forest floor. It was a lovely first session in the forest and over the coming weeks we look forward to learning more from Princess Marigold, Solomon and their other forest friends.

It has been a busy first week back for Lions and Tigers, so many exciting things have happened. We began the week with a visit from Baby Bear, from the story Whatever next. He encouraged us to use our imagination to build a space rocket out of whatever materials we could find. The children have really enjoyed retelling the story and acting out their own space adventures. This week we have also had our first visit to the school library and the Lions enjoyed a glorious afternoon in the forest. It has been a lovely week and the children are really engaged in our new topic.

Today marks the end of the children's first half term at 'big school'. The children shared what they have enjoyed and learnt since being here and the 'learning power' puppets celebrated the children as learning heroes. It has been a fantastic end to an amazing half term and we hope the children have a relaxing and enjoyable break.

The children have enjoyed taking part in 'Your time to Shine day', which has been a great opportunity to teach them about the importance of making themselves seen to traffic, especially when the clocks change.

Today the children have been thinking about whether a material is a solid or liquid and how and why it changes. We began with a solid and then added a liquid. The result was a matter that kept changing from solid to liquid: gloop. It was great to see the children exploring, getting messy and using fantastic descriptive language such as: slobbery, slippery, wet, slimy, like a slug, wiggly, squelchy and squashy. The children also noticed that it went from 'hard to soft'. We discussed why we thought the gloop kept changing from 'hard to soft': 'If we play with it, it goes hard'. Great exploring children.

Thursday was an exciting afternoon in Lions and Tigers because we made our first visit up to our forest school site. With the help of South Coast SCITT trainees, the children experienced den building, bug hunting, art and scavenger hunts. The children had good fun and the afternoon was finished off with marshmallows around the camp fire where we even caught sight of a Gruffalo.

It has been a busy second week in Lions and Tigers. We started off the week by launching our topic theme for this half term 'Superhero Me'. Whilst we love the Marvel and DC Comics characters these are not the ones we are thinking about, the children are the superheroes. This half term we are working on developing the children's self confidence and self esteem by realising that they can always achieve their best and that they should be proud of themselves and what they are currently capable off. We have done this with the help of the trainee teachers from South Coast SCITT, introducing the 4R 'learning powers' using the characters of Ruby Reciprocity, Milan Reflective, Rakesha Resourceful and Billy Resilient. Read more about these learning heroes here: http://www.bransgoreprimaryschool.co.uk/parents-zone/how-we-teach

WOW! What an amazing first week the children have had in Lions and Tigers. They have worked really hard getting used to the routines and have enjoyed learning about the Golden Rules. This afternoon they had Golden Time as recognition and celebration for keeping all theGolden Rules.

We have had an amazing first day at 'big school' getting to know our new teachers and friends. We are looking forward as the weeks progress to getting to know the routines and expectations of our new class.

The heatwave this week has given us a great opportunity to explore the properties of ice. The children came up with ways to free sea creatures trapped in ice. They devised an experiment to find the best way to melt the ice, tested their ideas and monitored the results. Perhaps you could ask one of our young scientists to tell you about their findings.

This week we have started our new topic 'All at sea'. The children have been thinking about floating and sinking by making their own sail boats. They came up with their own criteria of; it needed to be waterproof, it needed to float, it needed to be light, and it needed to move.

The children enjoyed testing their boats and thinking about how they could improve their designs.

This morning we had our very own Big Build in Lions and Tigers. It was lovely to see so many of our grown ups come in and help us create the most fantastic models. We definitely have some engineers in the making!

This week we had an exciting walk up to Harrow Wood Farm. This took us beyond our normal forest schools site, through exciting new woodland to the farmland beyond. This was very exciting, and Mrs Holley taught us lots about the work that is done on the farm and the uses of the produce. One of the most exciting things was looking at the 1957 Fordson and the newer John Deer tractors. Following this the children helped repair the Bug Hotel at our forest schools site. It was a very enjoyable morning.

On Wednesday we had a visit from Bransgore First Responders. We had a look around the vehicle and saw the range of equipment that they carry around with them. We also learnt about the vital life saving role they play in our community, including CPR, purpose of a defibrillator and heart rates. It was a really exciting morning.

We have enjoyed telling the story of Mr Gumpy and his motor car this week. We had fun acting out the story during our Forest Schools session and have written our own Mr Gumpy adventure back in the classroom.

As spring is now definitely upon us the children have helped us get our garden ready for the summer. We have already planted potatoes and beans, and are looking forward to planting more vegetables soon. To show the children the growing process we began by planting cress, the children then had to look after it so that when it had grown they could have a tasty cheese and cress sandwich.

As part of our week on pets, we have had a very exciting week of visitors in Lions and Tigers. The week began with Reuben bringing in his two tortoises and was then followed up with an overnight stay from Mercury Class gerbils. On Wednesday Mr Green brought Jackson, the bearded dragon and his live food, down to visit us. The week was finished off with a visit from Miss Thompson and her black labrador Bart. It has been so much fun finding out about each others pets and by the sounds of it we are all superb at looking after them.

Lions and Tigers have enjoyed thinking about wild animals and last week they went upto our forest schools site to enjoy stories. First the children went on a bear hunt, then they went where the wild things are. They created their own 'wild things', “and the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.” (Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are)

This week in Lions and Tigers we have had lots of fun learning about dinosaurs. We have used the Giles Andreae book to think about words that rhyme, and the Johnny Duddle story Giganotosaurus to make a large model. In addition to thinking about what dinosaurs ate and how they became extinct, we also used plaster of paris to make our own fossils. It has been a very enjoyable start to our 'All creatures great and small topic'.

The children were very excited to see on 'Bransgore School News' that dinosaurs had been spotted in the village. They went on a hunt around the school grounds and found a very interesting egg which we will be watching closely to see if anything hatches from it. Please join our discovery team and if you see anything, let us know @bps_JungleTeam #DinoHunters.

This exploration forms part of our new ‘All creatures great and small’ topic. Throughout this half term we will continue to explore different countries around the world, particularly focussing on the animals that originate there. Our exploration of different creatures will take us from the largest dinosaurs to the smallest minibeasts, and the deepest oceans to the warmest savannahs. As with our previous topics we will continue to encourage the children’s discovery of a range of different texts, this half term with books from Johnny Duddle, Giles Andre, Dr Seuss and many more.

We would like to invite you in to share this learning on the 7th April at 2:30pm.

This week in our ‘Where am I’ topic we have been thinking about England. We read stories about a bear called Paddington who came to England from Peru. We wrote instructions for making marmalade sandwiches, wrote our own Paddington adventure and in PE we have been practising our Morris dancing and welly wanging!

Our exploration of our greater environment through our 'Where am I?' topic took us on a world tour last week. After sharing where the children had been on their travels, we learnt Bollywood dancing from India, experienced new tastes from Africa, ending in Peru with Paddington. This week we will travel back to Great Britain with Paddington and look at British culture and values.

Lions and Tigers have been exploring rhythms in the forest this week. Using the African call and response song Toom-bah-ee-lero. The children had lots of fun exploring different 'drum' sticks, noticing those that produce high and low pitch notes.

This week as part of our "Where am I?" topic, we have been sharing places we have visited. We noticed on our travels that not everyone speaks the same language as us, so we have been learning how to say hello in their language.

This week as a conclusion to our exploration of space, the Lions and Tigers have been looking at The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh. They explored a variety of artistic medium to create large group and individual interpretations of the piece.